1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of effectively using an electric memory device (hereinafter referred to as a ‘memory’), and more particularly, to a memory management apparatus and method for storing data in units of variable size packets in appliances utilizing memory devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, when new memory space is needed in a computer or a communication device, the location of the memory space is determined in part of the memory device by a process referred to as allocation, and the location is managed by another memory space which keeps an address value referred to as a pointer. For this memory management, most computers and communications devices employ a method by which a memory device is divided into fixed-size units and managed. However, since uniform memory allocation is performed even for small-sized packets among variable sized packets in this method, the method has a drawback in that much space in the memory is wasted.
To solve this problem, a method is suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 6,088,777 granted to Sober on 11 Jul. 2000, entitled “Memory system and method for dynamically allocating a memory divided into plural classes with different block sizes to store variable length messages” and other patents, disclosing a method by which a memory device is not divided into fixed-size units beforehand but allocated a memory space appropriate to the request whenever there is a request for allocating a memory space.
However, although this method has an advantage in that wasting memory space can be minimized, its hardware implementation is complicated. In addition, since memory space rearrangement (referred to as garbage collection) should be performed periodically, this method can be applied only by software.